States will receive at least $100 million
Another round of literal welfare for Comcast & friends.
This better have clawback provisions in it or the broadband companies are just gonna pocket it and give everyone the middle finger.
This better have clawback provisions in it or the broadband companies are just gonna pocket it and give everyone the middle finger.
again. they’ve already done this once. they’re going to just take the money and raise their rates and do nothing. again.
I mean, I’d be stoked for this if the major ISPs didn’t just pocket the money and play dumb the last time this happened.
Seems incredibly stupid unless there’s actual oversight and accountability.
$40 billion for outdated and outclassed infrastructure. Brilliant.
Would be better spent ripping the current fiber infrastructure that exists from the hands of isps holding it hostage and expanding it.
Or just contracting with fiber layers directly to lay fiber.
It would be simpler to just do it when they update the interstate highways…. But they sat around with their thumbs up each other’s asses too long and can’t wait for that.
We did this though, in the early '00s. Look up “dark fiber”. The infrastructure is there, but everyone refused to use or maintain it.
The next step would have been to make ISP a state provided utility, and in corpo-murica that’s just tooo commie to accept.
The telecommunications expansion of the 90’s resulted in fiber running under the street in front of my house. I’m not allowed to access it, though, because Century Link prevents the local utility company from connecting it to any homes.
Since Century Link doesn’t serve my area, I had to use cellular satellite internet when I moved here, which was too shitty for my WFH job of ten years. And there was nothing else, so I lost my job.
The lesson here is that opportunities to fleece the government keep coming around, and you can either come up with a way to join the pirates or walk the damn plank.
Jesus christ that is bleak. Any idea what the public reasoning was for allowing Century to block your local utility, or if they even fucking attempted a public reason?
Most city councils and state legislators are more or less owned by ISPs. there probably wasn’t ever really a public reason given- just a lobby group saying 'you should vote this way, now enjoy your dinner.", and there was never any public comment because, who the hell has time to watch what their legislators are actually doing?
I’m pretty sure no reason was made public - I’ve never found any information in archives. I was stonewalled by the public utilities company for almost a year before they finally admitted, privately, that I’d never be connected due to the Century Link stranglehold. I did find an article from 2019 detailing the inadequate infrastructure that CL was refusing to upgrade, so maybe they can’t handle the load and won’t invest in a captive area? It’d probably mess up someone’s bonus.
It sounds like they’re basically just sending money to the states, so how efficiently it gets spent will depend largely on the state governments.
In Texas they’re absolutely going to give all of the money to big telecom companies to help them buy other big telecom companies, in California they’ll perform 20 years of environmental reviews before proudly giving DSL connections to 7 undocumented immigrants in Fresno, in Florida they’ll use it to create an alternative anti-‘woke’ internet with Great-Firewall-of-China levels of content censorship and dial-up level connection speeds, and in New York, the money will simply vanish, and nobody will know where it went or be particularly interested in finding out.
But in smaller / better-run states, the money might actually do some good.